


Your Angels Will Go Free

by teddybearandlily



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Not to Sam or Dean, Preseries, Teen Dean Winchester, Teen Sam Winchester, Weechesters, do people still use that tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-04-27 00:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14413617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teddybearandlily/pseuds/teddybearandlily
Summary: The winter Sam is fourteen, all supernatural entities in the United States disappear. The ensuing months spent hunting a monster solidify his desire to leave, his knowledge that he will soon have an essential and inevitable choice to make - and his hope that a better and true life is possible.





	1. Winter: I

**Author's Note:**

> This is canon in the essentials but not in the details.
> 
> A lot of the research for this was a bit half-hearted so forgive any inaccurate information, mistakes, anachronisms and flat out lies.
> 
> The hunt is not what you think it is going to be.

* * *

 

_‘Tell me yourself, I challenge you—answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.’_

_‘No, I wouldn't consent,’ said Alyosha softly._

 

                                                                         The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

* * *

  

The winter you’re fourteen, there’s no supernatural activity in the continental USA. None, nada, zilch. The map goes blank November first like somebody just turned out all the lights. Your father is concerned, of course. Gravely concerned. He never could let something good happen to you or the world without trying to ruin it.

Dean didn’t seem to mind. “Yeah it’s weird, man,” he said easily to Caleb on the phone, sprawled on his bed after a long day at the auto shop, before turning the conversation to the cute girl who had come into the garage earlier that day. Ever since Dean had left school, he took odd jobs like your father, cash under the table; hustled pool more often than you liked and you were convinced that one day something terrible would happen to Dean because of it but you kept quiet because you’d lost that argument so many times it wasn’t even worth it anymore. At least they never tried to make you do it.

Whenever you stay somewhere more than a month, unless your Dad needs serious backup for whatever he’s hunting, Dean gets a job in a garage. He’s good with cars and easy with both customers and bosses. He spends his pay checks on crappy motel rooms and ammunition for your father and clothes for you that you tell him not to buy because you’ll just outgrow them and his hand me downs are fine, and he’s also building a collection of classic rock tapes that drive you crazy. Thank god Dad limits their appearance. He prefers the radio and you like silence on a drive. 

You have no idea what you’ll do when you leave school and have to find something to occupy your time in between the hunts and the research. If you’ll even be qualified to do anything, or if you’ll just be a burden for your father and brother forever. Your father had shown you how to change the oil and left it at that. Dean liked to be alone when he worked on cars and you respected that.

The spring prior, you had gone on a hunt with Dad and Dean, just to provide cover really and warn them about any noisy neighbours, but the old man whose wife you had saved after a tense exorcism had been so grateful even though half his living room ceiling was burned that he insisted on giving you, Dean and Dad two thousand dollars each. You had worried about taking advantage of him, because his house wasn’t small but it wasn’t exactly a mansion so you asked if he was sure he’d be okay. He said he was saving up for a new car but wanted to forgo it and give you the money instead – really, it’s fine. Neither Dean or your father saw a problem with it because it wasn’t like you got a government salary for the common good you provided and wealthy people often got in touch with hunters who were more... classy than you were to take care of their supernatural hauntings. 

Dean said “Man, I wish we could take advantage of the elderly more often,” and then laughed at the disapproval on your face. He spent his money on parts for the Impala’s newest repair. Your father bought a Winchester 1873 rifle and you couldn’t resist rolling your eyes. You remembered when Dean was ten and training with Bobby’s Winchester and your father said as an aside to six year old you, sitting cross legged on the hood of one of the junkyard’s cars watching your big brother with wide eyes, “Ah, Winchester... we never had a chance.” He was smiling and you thought it was a good thing, what he was saying.

You had put your money, every last penny, into a savings account set up with Pastor Jim’s address and dared your father to say anything. Even though you had really needed a new Walkman because yours kept skipping. Dean had got you one for your next birthday anyway. 

You don’t know what you’re saving for. It certainly isn’t enough for college although you do have four more years to continue saving. It isn’t like your father has ever considered your future and what you might need for it. He would never save anything for you. Your teacher last year told you to consider college and you come back to his speech and think about the whole idea sometimes. But college seems so far away from your life. Like it’s not applicable at all. You’ve got four years until you’re eighteen and it seems like a lifetime away.

You have almost no idea what your life will look like by then. Maybe your father will have gone down in a blaze of fury and it’ll just be you and Dean. Or maybe Dean sacrificed himself to save both of you and your father ended up diving headfirst into a bottle. Maybe you’ll be with social services, or on your own, or with Pastor Jim. Maybe you’ll all be dead. Maybe nothing will have changed.

Or maybe you’ll have found the thing that killed your mother and you’ll all have settled down in some little town by the coast or in the suburbs of a big city and you’ll build a new life together, away from the dusty Midwest and go on weekend hunts together and your father will be proud of you for wanting to go to college, proud you survived the instability of your childhood. Maybe he’ll apologise to you for it all and you’ll say it’s okay because it all worked out in the end.

You have a horrible feeling either Dad or Dean are going to end up in hospital after a nasty hunt and you won’t be able to use a credit card scheme, and you can't run because it's grave and serious and you’ll end up using the money on that.

                                                                        ~

Of course, your father is right. Demons don’t just turn out the lights. If they go, they go screaming and kicking and they take hunters with them. They don’t go easy or quiet. The lack of supernatural activity almost definitely has a supernatural cause. And anything that could make every single monster go silent, especially goddamn demons, is definitely something of interest to hunters.

You’ve been in Michigan for three weeks, chasing after a skinwalker. Dad and Dean have been gone for half of that time. You’re in high school now, long since old enough to take care of yourself. You remember Dean at fourteen. It had seemed so old then, when he had taken care of himself and you, his ten-year-old brother, with such seeming ease.

Your father has fixated on the lack of demonic activity with his usual single track narrowmindedness. He spends three days on the phone with every single contact he has (apart from Pastor Jim who had refused his call and you had sniggered, remembering how Jim had flung your dad out onto the porch ass first the previous spring) and many more he’s never heard of before. Not a single one of them knows what has happened. None of them have done anything – or admitted to doing anything – that would send all the demons back to hell. EMF devices sit silent. Wards go untested. People randomly drop dead and when hunters look into it, it turns out before their death they showed signs of demonic possession. There will be many more people who have survived their possession and suddenly wake up out of the blue and don’t remember what has happened for the past few months or years. You hope they all keep quiet for fear of nobody believing them.

But then it gets weirder. Via Bobby, Pastor Jim goes to visit a locked-in djinn (“Yes, okay, Sam, I suppose you could say he’s a genie in a bottle!”: Pastor Jim had the patience of a saint but you at twelve could break even that) to see if it knows anything about the demonic disappearance; the djinn isn’t in the cave where Pastor Jim left it even though Pastor Jim swears he would know if it left. 

Bobby checks in on the werewolf family who have lived in the Ozarks in Arkansas for generations and never bothered anybody, and finds their house empty – still standing, dirty dishes in the dishwasher, no signs of a struggle, alarm system not even turned on. They didn’t take anything that Bobby can see or write a note or tell anyone about a trip, not the mother’s work or the child’s school. They don’t seem to have fled or been taken. They’ve just disappeared. Like all beings aware of the supernatural, the werewolf house had wards and protections. Bobby checks each one meticulously. None of them were broken. It’s the same story in supernatural homes all across the country. Homes that hunters knew about, whether they tolerated them, kept a close eye on them, or were simply next on their hit list were checked and all showed the same thing. No disturbance. 

You’re confused briefly because one day there’s a lot of chatter about Missouri and you think you’ll be heading there soon until your father tells you she’s a psychic who has suddenly lost her abilities.

Four days in your father sighs angrily as Bobby puts him on hold again to ‘quickly check something’ with one of his contacts. Last time that had happened, it had been half an hour before Bobby had come back on the line. Your father had paced a hole into the already threadbare carpet in the small living room. You wonder which poor schmuck’s name your father has taken the credit card out in to pay for the phone call. 

Bobby has just told your father that Pastor Jim thinks that maybe some kind of natural disaster is coming in the US. The big one, out in LA, or maybe Yellowstone will erupt. Supernatural creatures are getting out of the way. Except Bobby called his contacts in Mexico and Canada and they report business as usual there and nothing more. No influx of tricksters and hauntings and demonic possession. No increase in unexplained deaths and phenomenon. If the monsters have fled they’re keeping quiet, wherever they are.

“Shit,” Dean mouths to you when you hear the natural disaster theory. Your father is on the sofa and you’re at the table with Dean but you can hear their conversation easy. Your father tends to yell into the phone and Bobby is even worse.

You did a school project once on earthquakes in California. You remember Northridge on the TV. Demons had taken advantage of the chaos, as ever, and had gone to feed on the terror and panic of the people trapped under the underpass that had collapsed. 

“Why would the demons run away from an earthquake if was coming, Dad?” You ask while your father waits for Bobby to get back to him. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not like an earthquake could kill them. Why wouldn’t they just wait outside of California until it’s over and then go in and feast on people’s souls and um, lifeforces? Why are they all gone from here and nowhere else?”

It seems a reasonable question to you but your Dad scowls. You make a face at Dean and say quietly, “It’s a perfectly valid question!” 

“Let it go, Sammy,” he replies. “Who knows why demons do anything.”

That’s actually a fair point so you do let it go.

Your father is still on hold. He mutters, “Semple, I’ve never even heard of him.”

“You should have a hunter database,” you say. “You know, so you wouldn’t have to keep going through Bobby. And it would make coordinating things easier, whenever something like this happens.”

You learned about computer databases and their uses in school. Your Math teacher is a real computer geek. Of course, your father doesn’t often - or ever, really - give a fuck about what you learned in school, even when you’re sure it could be applicable to hunting.

“Nothing like this ever has happened, Sam,” your father barks abruptly. He’s tense and hasn’t slept much in four days and you suppose that things could be very bad right now and he’s trying to save you all but you were just trying to help. You decide to double down.

“Well, yeah but let’s say on a smaller scale, it could still be helpful. Like, let’s say you’re chasing a werewolf pack here in Michigan and they cross over into Indiana, you could call the hunters there and get them to head the werewolves off.”

“Shut it, Sam,” he says, reaching up in a fluid motion to take the ball you’re idly tossing against the wall. You let him, slumping against the wall. Your dad really is on edge.

“That wouldn’t be safe,” Dean pipes in. “Demons could use something like that. Imagine the havoc they could wreak with a list of every hunter in the United States." 

No shit. You’re not too sure about how Dad will react to you swearing, when he’s this uptight, even though Dean started when he was eleven.

“Well, _obviously_ ,” you say instead. Do they really think you hadn’t thought about that? You chuck another ball to Dean. It’s low and fast but he catches it easily. He smirks at you but doesn’t throw it back. Your dad is too high wired for Dean to be fooling around right now. You don’t know if he will ever be too high wired for you to stop messing with him.

“I know that. It could be encrypted. There would be lots of ways to stop demons from getting to it. And they’re not too big on computers, anyway. Pastor Jim told me. Or modern technology at all actually. I mean, they like destroying it, they love playing with electricity, obviously, but they don’t like how we use electricity to detect them. Can you imagine how easily demons could take over the world if they wanted to given our reliance on energy grids? Thankfully they just don’t work that well together and I guess they think on Biblical timescales. I think if we ever did create world peace though they would definitely become interested in our politics. Pastor Jim told me demons killed Jesus but I _think_ he was joking. Or speaking metaphorically maybe. If demons tried to take over then we would really need a database of hunters. Though a lot of them would be compromised, I guess.” 

“It’s a good idea, Sam,” your father surprises you by saying. You weren’t aware he was even still listening. He tends to tune you out a lot but then again, you’re also pretty sure he feigns at selective hearing a lot of the time. “But this ain’t the marines. I don’t trust a hunter just because they’re a hunter or just because they’re on some list. I need confirmation of his reliability before I’d let him watch my or my son’s back.”

“The database could _help_ you in vetting people, Dad,” you say but clearly the fight has been lost. You resume your history homework. You’ve got to write a campaign speech for the 1932 presidential election. You were assigned Hoover which you’re happy about because it’s the more difficult one by far so it’s more of a challenge. You decide to end it “from sea to shining sea, America will prosper. I will be the man to lead her.” You’ve noted down things you want to include so now you just have to actually write it. Everyone in your class is going to read out their speech in the next class and then you’re going to vote for the best one and there’ll be a prize. Dean would call it geeky, but you’re secretly excited about the prospect of winning something for your academic ability. 

You know a lot about the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression because you covered it at the school before the last. Or maybe the one before that. Sometimes when that happens you can take a different class instead but the current school said your schedule couldn’t allow you switching and you didn’t put up too much of a fight because when you asked Dad how long the hunt was going to take he said probably only two months. And his estimates are always conservative. You can put up with learning the same stuff in history class for a month.

Of course, now the hunt has disappeared. The skinwalker in Michigan your father is hunting has disappeared just like every other supernatural entity across the country. It’s clear to you that you’ll be moving soon so you don’t really see the point in getting too far ahead in your classes but then again, Dad could easily pull the rug from under your feet and say you’re staying for six months. It’s not like you ever get a say. You decide to compromise and do the reading for all your classes for the next two weeks and make notes but not answer the assigned questions for the chapters yet. 

Everyone is suspicious about what has happened and your father tells you it will not be an excuse to slack off; he orders your training drills to double. He’s overprotective with the two of you to the point where even Dean is chafing at him and reckless to the point of death with himself. Twice he provokes bar fights and comes home dropping blood onto the linoleum and Dean makes a face and scrubs it out, exaggeratedly talking in a too cheerful and light-hearted voice about the stain and how it will never come out while you sit on your bed reading, determinedly not saying anything, and your father ignores the both of you. He’s coming completely undone without a hunt or the prospect of one. You try and avoid him as best as you can but even before the disappearance that wasn't exactly uncommon.

Your dad stumbles into the bedroom one evening, drunk off his face, stumbling. You’re trying to write your essay on To Kill a Mockingbird as he stumbles closer to you, and you can’t help it, you flinch, even though you’re not really all that scared of him when he’s drunk because that’s been a constant as long as you can remember and anyway John Winchester is far more terrifying stone cold sober.

Even drunk, damn him, your father notices everything. He sees you flinch.

He hollers ‘Dean!’ who comes running from the kitchen, breathless. “What?” Dean demands. “What?” 

Your father responds by falling, face first, onto his bed.

You just shrug at Dean when he looks to you to explain. Your father won’t remember in the morning.

“Oh, Dad, you’re drunk,” Dean says, shoving at your dad to make sure he won’t choke in the night and he’s so focused on that Dean doesn’t notice when you slip out of the room and go into the bright, warm kitchen and fall heavily into a chair.

Nobody knows what has happened, even Pastor Jim and Bobby, and it deeply concerns them. Your father is making you do double research, and of course he doesn’t care that finals are coming up even though of course he would bitch if your grades dropped, not because he cares about your future but because somebody might notice and god forbid you bring attention to yourself.

Dean swings by school every day to pick you up and every time you tense when you get in and say hello because you’re convinced this time will be the time your father has decided, out of nowhere and for no reason comprehensible to anyone but himself, to move you all halfway across the country.

Well, this time there would be a reason. Hunters are converging on LA. Pastor Jim’s theory is the most popular despite Bobby’s doubts that demons would run from the promised bounty of a natural disaster.

“Yes!” You said after you heard that. “Tell Bobby I agree!”

Hunters are running towards the fire so that after the possible earthquake, when the demons are taking advantage of the chaos and misery and feasting on it, they will hopefully be easy prey. 

You suppose it’s brave of them. You also suppose they’re all fucking crazy. Well, they can dig their own grave. You won’t stop them.

They make discrete enquiries, apparently, but the scientists one hunter saved at Caltech say there’s no more probability currently than there normally is for the Pacific Plate to slip past the North American fault in a sudden movement, producing the Big One. Or for Yellowstone to erupt, for that matter. But you all know there are some things science can’t explain.

The Herbert Hoover election campaign speech gets written and you read it out dramatically in history class, putting in appropriate dramatic pauses and flourishes. Everyone claps but when the vote comes Richard wins even though he read his short and dry speech looking down at his notes and totally flat. The teacher tells you yours was the best, as if you didn’t know, and says her vote counts twice and gives you the prize. It’s fizzy gummy worms which you don’t even like.

You come home and lay on your bed, sulking a little. Dean comes in at six as usual. Normally he showers before making dinner but today he talks with your father in the kitchen and then comes into your room. 

“We’re heading out, bitch,” Dean says, jostling your shoulder.

“Great,” you say sarcastically but you’re not too upset. Michigan kind of sucks. You pack up quickly and efficiently even though there’s no rush this time. “Where we going?”

“Don’t know but we’re hooking up with Bobby.” 

“What about Pastor Jim?”

“I don’t _know_ , Sam.”

You end up driving to Pastor Jim’s house. Dad doesn’t say but as you clear Chicago and head west on the I-90 you know. 

Your father scowls at Jim as he enters the house. You really want to hear the story behind that one. Your father had told you he was not above taping your mouth shut when you had asked for the third time, back when you were driving away, his mouth still bleeding a bit from where Jim had sucker punched him. You had shut up because your father was wrong and you could totally be quiet to save your life. 

Pastor Jim and Bobby are the only two hunters your father trusts you with. You think this means he’s going to drop you in Minnesota and go off and do something reckless and dangerous. Wouldn’t be the first time but could be the last. There’s no reckoning with John Winchester when he’s like this.

But when you ask him if he’s going somewhere else, the _to do something stupid_ left unspoken but obvious in your tone, he just says that he’s not and also informs you that he thinks there is safety in numbers. Your father does not think this and has never thought this but you also don’t really care because Pastor Jim has just adopted a tiny stray kitten and you spend almost all of your time feeding her and playing with her and watching her sleep.

She was found half dead in a snowstorm and when he got her to the vet she said there was only a small chance she would make it, but she did. She’s a little fighter. And a hunter, Jim laughs – she kills any mice she comes across and fights a valiant battle to the death with your shoelaces. When they’re chewed up and spat on the floor you concede victory. 

Dean makes fun of you for holding her close when you watch TV, curled up tightly on your chest and purring contentedly, but you catch him one evening petting her as she sits regally, meowing at him, and saying “Yes, you’re a cat, aren’t you. You’re a cat.”

There’s a lot of uncertainty and mistrust in the hunter community right now, Pastor Jim says. Hunters are having to put all their cards on the table to try and understand what’s happening and it’s causing some considerable friction. Long buried secrets are being unearthed and it’s leading to a lot of “You promised me you’d taken care of that coven!” and “I told you they weren’t dead!”

Hunters aren’t naturally sociable types, you know, so you’re not too surprised.

When you see your father screaming down the line at Bobby, who is still stuck in South Dakota playing host to hunters from the surrounding states before they head off to California, you go over and shake his shoulder. 

“Maybe this is what demons want,” you say.

“What?” Your father barks, still frowning into the phone. He hangs up while Bobby is mid-sentence.

“Hunters off-balance. Not trusting each other. Fearful and divided.”

“And then they think they’ll come back all of a sudden and deal us a hell of a blow.” Your father understands immediately. He’s incredibly sharp, despite having never attended college.

“Well, that ain’t gonna happen,” he continues. “Every hunter in the country is waiting and ready for them. We’re stocking ammo and making sure our guns are in working order. Every retired hunter is active again. Every child of a hunter knows where the guns are and knows how to protect their friends and classmates. The demons can try but they won’t be able to take us off guard.”

“Maybe not what you should take from that, Dad.”

“Hunters know how not to kill each other. The hunter community has its meeting places. I’ve never taken you there and don’t look at me like that, you know you would moan like hell if I ever took you to one, they ain’t exactly upscale classy establishments. I’m not in this to make friends but a lot of hunters know each other well and have for years. We ain’t splitting over this. Hunters know how to deal with each other with loaded guns during a hunt and unloaded ones after. I don’t trust any hunter I don’t know with you or Dean but I do trust them to be on guard against demons.”

“Has Dean been to one? A non-classy, downscale hunter establishment, I mean.”

Your father looks at you for a long moment. You can’t tell from his expression what he’s thinking. “I don’t control where that boy goes. Maybe he has. Him and Caleb, after a hunt.”

Your father has left you in freezing cold barns with blankets and propane heaters, 12th story apartments with cracked windows and crack dealers outside, at crummy motel rooms where the locks were broken and he told you salt and Dean with a shot gun would make an adequate substitution. He’s left you alone in a locked car with a gun and instructions to shoot only one warning shot. But he won’t leave you in some hunter dive bar where all of the patrons have a gun they know how to use and are aware of all the dangers the outside world poses; where you’d be as safe as you would with him, where the worst danger is you getting drunk.

You’ll never understand him. At this point, you don’t want to.

                                                                  ~

Bobby arrives while you’re changing the cat’s water bowl. Caleb, of course, has gone to LA, wanting to be in the thick of the action – Dean asked “Do you want me to go?” but your father said no, thank god – but both Bobby and Pastor Jim decided not to go. It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that a clustering of hunters in LA leaves vast swathes of the country unprotected.

Pastor Jim will stay and be ready to defend the upper midwest. Bobby is heading out to Nashville to try and reason with a hunter there who has ‘gone crazy’, try to convince him to shut the hell up before everyone in Tennessee hears about the old man who says monsters are real. Your father and Jim decided to call a truce and combine forces and spend a few days at Jim’s trying to figure out what has happened. Bobby was invited in the interest of there not being a bloodbath. 

“Stay vigilant, stay vigilant!” Bobby yells when you almost bowl him over. Stay vigilant is now the mantra of your life. Some hunter out in Oregon had taken to ending his conversations with it and a lot of the hunters have taken it up, half-jokingly, half serious. 

“Sorry!” you say but you don’t stop running. “Hiya, Bobby!”

You talk to Pastor Jim about your database idea.

“That’s a great idea, Sam!” He sounds genuinely enthusiastic. “How about you write out some preliminary ideas and we can go over them tomorrow? We can present them to other hunters when we’ve got a working idea.”

You spend the whole evening thinking about it, while Dean cleans the guns and your father gets drunk and rowdy with Bobby. Pastor Jim is working on his Sunday sermon in his office. You see Dean looking enviously at your father and Bobby inside. He clearly wants to get drunk with them. Dean loves stuff like that, the camaraderie of the hunter lifestyle, getting drunk and boasting of your latest hunt and how many monsters you took down. You tell him you’d be happy to clean the guns and also keep watch which is what he’s really doing, sober and sharp on the porch with a selection of your finest hardware.

He shuts you down. “No,” he says flatly, looking down and returning to cleaning the gun, more vigorously then before. You don’t push. You can count on the number of fingers how many times you’ve made Dean do something he doesn’t want to do when he’s dead set against it. He’s susceptive to your wheedling – or, well, whining really – but if he thinks there’s something he _should_ do, particularly to protect his family, it’s almost impossible to talk him out of it. Big into duty and honour, your brother. Even if the duty is stupid and the honour bloody.

Dean seems happy, living your nomadic life. You really don’t know whether he is or not. You can’t deny the glint in his eye after a successful hunt, trudging back to the car with heavy packs and mud soaked boots, Dean excited and triumphant, but also as relaxed as you ever see him. You can’t imagine being truly happy and content, living the life you do. But your father does always say you’re selfish.

You think about the database, tapping your pencil on a sheet of blank paper. You decide Dean is right, it’s too dangerous having a database of names of hunters. Sure, demons don’t like technology now but that could change. God knows they love messing around with cars.

The bigger risk is actually the police. Most hunters will have connections to apparently unexplained murders and various other crimes and connecting them to each other could make them seem like some kind of criminal underworld gang. Which, they kind of are, but while you don’t want this to be your life you’ll sleep better at night knowing somebody is doing it.

You decide a mailing list is a better idea, with fake names and an email address which you think should be created solely for that purpose and have no identifying information in, sorted by state, and strictly no other information. That way, if hunters in a particular area need to be told something about a hunt or a creature then you can easily get in touch with them. More and more hunters have computers and email. You don’t but you could easily keep up to date at a library. That will be better for not being traced, anyway.

You don’t really know how you would encrypt the list, despite what you told Dean. You make that a question mark at the bottom of your piece of paper and decide you’ll talk to Pastor Jim about it.

Pastor Jim agrees with your mailing list idea which makes you puff up happily and then immediately deflates you by telling you about all of the various problems involved. He tells you that some hunters are rich and can easily get you in touch with the kind of people who know how to encrypt something so that actually won’t be an issue but you’ll have to consider very carefully how to fund the enterprise, and particularly the cost of encrypting on an ongoing basis.

He tells you it’ll be a lot of work. You’ll have to have a list of hunters willing to take part before you do anything else. Pastor Jim knows a lot of them but things change fast in the hunter world and most are reclusive for very good reasons. Some will be retired or dead. Others will have ‘gone rogue’ and the very last people you want to be contacting about supernatural threats. There will be new hunters who maybe don’t even know a hunter community exists. The hunters will all be at varying levels of trustworthiness and ability.

And then you’ll have to contact all of those hunters, all of them suspicious and prone to reclusiveness, and get them to agree to being on the list and convince them of its worth and usefulness. Then you’ll have to set up email addresses and send them to the people involved.

You’ll have to decide who has access to the list. All hunters on it? Hunters who don’t want to be on it but may want to contact someone at some point? What about contacts who are in the know but not hunters themselves? That would make it potentially more useful but significantly less safe. You’ll have to decide appropriate situations to use the list. After all that, it might not even work. Also, more dangerously, you suppose people could use it to lay traps.

You definitely don’t want to make it obvious a fourteen-year-old boy is coordinating it but the hunters have to know it’s trustworthy and legitimate. You don’t know what effect using the Winchester name would have because your father sure as hell has a reputation. He’s known as a rock solid hunter, sure, but also as a man who’s a prickly son of a bitch who never listens to anyone else’s orders and that’s dangerous on a hunt. Hunters make allowances for their own but your father has overstepped his more than once now. It might be best for Pastor Jim to be the one contacting hunters. A lot of them know him and trust him. 

You tell Jim not to worry. There’s a lot to think about and prepare but you’ll have time. You never go to school when you’re with Pastor Jim or Bobby because it’d be too hard to explain the random disappearances and reappearances and your father is very careful not to draw attention in the places he’s designated as the final safe haven if all else fails. You’ve never cared about this before because if you’re there for longer than two weeks it’s generally the summer.

This time, it’s early November but Dean doesn’t have school this year for the first time and nobody is too concerned about yours, given what’s happened. Dean does tell you he got your transcript from Michigan. You have no idea how because you left in the middle of the semester but you don’t know how much it matters because it clearly states you didn’t finish the semester. God knows what Dean did to get it so you just truthfully tell him how awesome he is. 

You do school in the morning with Pastor Jim’s many books and computer when you need to look something up and you’ll make a big deal of it after the Christmas holidays if you have to. Dean will back you up and Jim too if needed and maybe you’ll get to see him haul off and punch your father again.

The list of hunters turns out to be not that big of an issue. The crisis has forced everyone closer together. Pastor Jim writes down a list of all the hunters he knows and tells you to be very careful with it. You spend two days going through it, as Dean and Jim and Dad and Bobby argue about what’s happening and what to do until they decide the best thing to do is wait whereupon another hunter usually calls and gets them all into an argument again, painstakingly cross referencing with your father’s journal and crossing out hunters who are dead and writing down the names of ones Jim doesn’t know about.

You use Caleb to get accurate and up to date knowledge on the younger hunters, because Caleb is friendly and always willing to help a new recruit. Caleb is also far better than Pastor Jim in telling you who’s reliable and who’s not as he’s in the field almost constantly and unlike your father likes to have company on hunts. Bobby also helps, primarily in getting in touch with old hunters where you’re unsure of whether they’re still active or not. He inadvertently makes a few of them come out of retirement when they hear what’s going on. Some hunters really are off the grid. You hope to god whatever is going to happen in the future won’t kill them. Your father knows what you’re doing and you know if the system gets up and running he’ll never use it but he doesn’t try to discourage you.

Well. Maybe he would use it if another hunter had information on the thing that killed your mother. You don’t know how he will know if it’s the same demon – if it was a demon at all – but demons do like to talk. Maybe you could pool together knowledge on specific supernatural threats from different hunters. A computer system could be kept up to date far easier than a handwritten journal. Although again, there would be the danger of traps and it would be vulnerable to deception.

You’ve gotten a water-tight list together of about 150 hunters, which sounds like a lot but is only three per state (although this average doesn’t reflect the actual geographical concentration, the map skews to the Midwest and there are thirty-three hunters in California alone), but you only want ones Caleb has approved, at least at the beginning. You’re starting to think about sending some introductory notice to tell them what you’re considering and if they’re tentatively interested when your father tells you you’re going to Iowa.

Fucking Iowa. In winter. With no Pastor Jim or his laptop or his kitten he let you name Rosie. With, instead, your father breathing down your neck because Dean won’t argue with him and he needs to argue with someone. With no demons or werewolves or skinwalkers or wraiths for your father to go out and kill to get away from you and probably no public transport for you to get away from him. With corn and cows and prairie. With another school you’ll never fit in at.

You sulk for the remaining three days. You don’t want to seem childish in front of Bobby and Pastor Jim so you try to not be too obvious. Your father is so distracted by the disappearing demons that he doesn’t even seem to notice. But it’s easier to avoid each other and be civil in a big house and with both Pastor Jim and Bobby there as a buffer.

Your father hasn’t even considered settling down even though the creatures have been gone for almost two weeks. You’re going to Iowa because a few cows have been stolen. Not even mutilated or drained of blood. Just gone.

“Maybe the demons took them,” you wisecracked and your father glared. You suggested that obviously the local teens were stealing cows because there was nothing else to do in Iowa and your father told you he was revoking your privilege to sit in the room and discuss the ‘case’ with the grown-ups.

“Fine,” you retorted and you had stamped up the wooden stairs and slammed your bedroom door. You instantly regretted it, imagining what your father was saying about you below and whether Bobby and Pastor Jim were agreeing.

“The boys can stay here,” Bobby had said when your father had announced he was going to Iowa to check the case out.

“The boys are coming with me,” your father replied.

You leave Sunday afternoon. You wanted to go to Pastor Jim’s sermon but you woke up too late. You eat a quiet lunch with Bobby and Dean. Grilled cheese and tomato soup. It clogs in your throat. When you’re only half-finished you ask to be excused and Bobby says “Sure, Sam.”

You jump up and wince as your chair scrapes across the stone floor. You carry your bowl and plate over to the sink and rinse them. Dean says he’ll do the washing up and you did help him to make the grilled cheeses so you take the chance to flee.

You’re leaving at three. You don’t know where your father is. Probably sleeping in his room. It’s weirder that Pastor Jim isn’t at your literal last supper. You all know after the cow disappearance in Iowa turns out to be nothing your father will find a case somewhere else and you’ll wind up on Pastor Jim’s doorsteps in a year or two, half dead and bloodied. Or maybe not at all.

You want to say goodbye and you know your father isn’t sentimental enough to delay your journey if you don’t do it before the exact departure time. You find Pastor Jim sitting in his study. You knock, uncertain, but he waves you in and smiles at you kindly as you sit in one of his armchairs. It’s an old lady armchair. You’ve never asked who it belonged to. With hunters, there are some things you just don’t ask.

“We were just eating lunch and I...”

You trail off. Suddenly, you don’t know what to say. You notice Pastor Jim’s eyes are red rimmed. He could just be tired, he’s been doing a lot of the coordinating between hunters recently, but it brings you up short. He’s got a single newspaper page open in front of him and a piece of paper he seems to be making notes on.

“What are you reading?” You sound young and cautious.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Okay,” you say.

“I’ll miss you, Sam.”

“I’ll miss you too. I can’t believe Dad isn’t taking this chance to stay in one place. I don’t know why there are more chances of demons in Iowa than here.”

“At least you’ll be able to go to school.”

Working with Pastor Jim is fun but you have to admit, you’ve been missing talking to someone who isn’t a hunter, your brother or a cat. It will be nice to go back to school even if you don’t fit in. You fit in at this house with men who have lost everything, the house stuffed to the rafters with guns and devil's traps and consecrated knives, where the dinner conversation is how to best kill a vengeful ghost and what weapons are best to decapitate vampires. You don’t want to fit in here.

“Yeah, but we won’t be able to work on the mailing list of hunters any more. And I’ll miss Rosie.” 

“She’ll miss you. And your brother. Don’t worry, me and Bobby will tell your father he needs to come here for some reason after Iowa.” 

“It won’t work,” you sigh.

Your father may acquiesce, but he probably won’t. Coming here to pool knowledge with Pastor Jim and Bobby and use Jim's books to do research and try and find out what happened didn't work. You're still no closer to figuring out what happened to the demons. Neither you nor Pastor Jim can know whether your father will be persuaded. Jim'll ask anyway and you’ll feel hope anyway. 

“Well. Maybe not. But the mailing list isn’t going anywhere. It’s a long term project anyway.”

“Dad doesn’t care about it at all.”

And that’s the cold hard truth. Whatever you do, even when you’re trying to improve hunting on your own initiative, will never be enough.

“Your father’s never been one for technology and innovation. He looked like my computer was going to bite him when I first got it.”

“I guess.” 

“We’ve got two hours before you leave. You want to work on the list until then?”

“Sure.” 

You spread out paper and make phone calls and murmur softly to each other. You figure out that a hunter in Alabama in your father’s journal actually died a year previously. You note down that another hunter is retired and make a note to ask Bobby to call him.

When it’s almost three you reluctantly put the pencil down and give Jim the sheets of paper to lock in his safe. You hug him hard.

“Thank you for having us.”

“Always a pleasure, Sam.”

“And I’m sorry I was kind of huffy and spent so much time alone.”

“You’re a teenager. I think that’s to be expected.”

“I just –”

And you almost tell Jim about what Mr Truman said last year but at the last moment you can’t do it. You don’t know how he will react and you don’t know how you want him to react. If he told you your dreams were stupid and unachievable it would hurt but maybe it would be better in the long run.

But if he told you that college was possible and you should consider it, which you suspect he would – that’s almost as scary. You think he holds back from discussing college or careers other than hunting and ending up six feet under by thirty because he thinks you’re not interested, just like Dean, or maybe he’s just shrewd and knows not to bring it up around your father.

When you were four and here for the whole summer after your father ‘got into a car accident’ which you know now was almost the truth but a demon threw his car off a bridge with him in it instead of a collision, and he had to spend six weeks laid up at Pastor Jim’s, Pastor Jim read you a children’s book about Galileo and you told him you were going to be a scientist when you grew up and he smiled at you and said “That’s great, Sammy, you’d be a really clever scientist,” and you still remember that ten years later.

You wonder what you’ll remember in ten year’s time about this trip and what you’ll think about it, whether you're being brave for holding your tongue or stupid. And whether you’ll regret it.

“Try and be understanding of your father. I know that the hunting, nomadic lifestyle isn’t easy on you. But - he’s doing his best.” Pastor Jim is serious and sad as he tells you this. You’re incredulous. 

You rear back, stricken. “Did Dad tell you to say that?”

“Sam, wait –” 

You’re already running away and not looking back. Hunters are great at that. 

You don’t want to see Dean or Bobby as you run out of the house so they can interrupt you and ask why you’re upset. They’re probably having their own sad farewell. Bobby loves Dean. He loves you, too, but sometimes he doesn’t really know what to make of you.

You’ve got a terrible life but you’ve also got people who love you. It doesn’t seem like many, Dean and Dad and Pastor Jim and Bobby, but you suppose it’s more than some, probably. Your father has isolated you to the degree that the only people you could possibly confide in are all hunters – funny that. 

Doing his best. His best? If this is your father’s best, you would sure as hell hate to see his worst. Or his average. His best just isn’t god damn good enough. He certainly never tires in telling you that your best isn’t good enough. 

Pastor Jim has always been the one person you thought would understand you. But of course, in the end, he would side with your father in the end. He’s a hunter. You always forget he was a friend of your father’s before he was your honorary uncle. 

He comes to find you sitting on a pew, staring blankly at the cross. The agony and the ecstasy. It’s where you had always run to as an upset child, when you were upset for stupid reasons like getting the red cup when Dean got the blue cup and then Dean swapped them around for you and suddenly you wanted the red one and your father told you babies didn’t get juice at all; and for not so stupid reasons like your Dad promised you could stay until the new school year in August and then on the 14th June he found a hunt and refused to leave you with Jim because he didn’t know how long the hunt would take and there were actually signs of a demon infestation in Colorado after that and he couldn’t impose on Jim any longer.

Soon you won’t be an upset child and you’ll have to find somewhere else to run to.

Pastor Jim prays beside you. You know he’s praying for your safety and your happiness and that you will live a righteous life. You appreciate it because it’s how he expresses his love, like Bobby giving Dean small tasks to work on the car when he’s angry or frustrated and doesn’t know how to show it.

You also think it’s cowardly, him leaving your safety and wellbeing up to God. If you die in a hunt or in a totally mundane car crash when Dean is too tired to keep his eyes on the road because he refuses to just stop for a few hours because your father trusted him to keep on driving, will he pray for your soul at your funeral and believe he did all he could? You don’t know.

He turns to you and says your name.

“Yeah,” you say, tightly and unhappily.

“I’m sorry for what I said. It wasn’t right. And it wasn’t what I meant. Your father has had a hard life but that doesn’t mean your suffering is okay.”

You’ve had a ‘hard life’ – because your father made you. Because of his choices and actions.

You’re not five anymore. You can’t sink into an adult’s arms and expect for them to protect you. But you are sad like a child and you wish, just for a moment, you could be treated like one. Like when you were five years old and upset because you lost your favourite bear and Pastor Jim found him beneath your bed and dusted him down for you and the world was back to rights again.

Almost ten years on, and you know the world will never be at rights because demons roam the earth and you can try and fight against them but you’ll never get them all, you’ll never be fast or strong enough to send them all back to where they belong. Even now when they seem to be gone they’re still causing all this trouble. But you’re a Winchester and you weren’t raised to turn back at the first sign of danger. 

“Yeah, I know. I do know. Dad loves us.”

You’re just starting to wonder how much that matters.

“You know, it’s the most normal thing in the world for a teenager to argue with his father.”

“Yeah. I better go. It’s three.”

“Promise me you’ll call if you need to.” 

“Yeah.” 

“God be with you, Sam.”

“God bless.”

You hug him again and say goodbye, unconsoled.


	2. Winter: II

You arrive in some small town in Iowa at two in the morning. You can’t see much for the dark; you just grab your bag and head straight into the motel. It’s a nice one. The walls are whitewashed and the blankets clean and there are shutters on the windows that you admire as you salt the windowsills. The night receptionist is friendly and on your way in Dean had laughed as you passed an old tractor in the drive at the front of the motel. 

You take one room at the furthest reach of the motel, on the back side, the Impala directly below the windows, so you can bail quickly if need be. And need might be. You don’t get much choice out in the prairielands and the motel you’re at is more expensive than you would normally choose so you’re all sharing a room. 

The room is big enough but there’s no kitchen so you’re condemned to greasy takeaways for as long as you’re here. You hope it won’t take long. Even if it only takes a week it’ll be close enough to the winter vacation for your father to maybe take you back to Jim’s and stay there for a while.

Your father checks the salt lines you poured and the locks Dean flipped before he lies down and falls asleep immediately on top of the covers of one of the beds. Dean throws one of your ratty trunk blankets on top of him and tells you to take the other bed. He sets up the camp bed at the foot of the two beds while you brush your teeth. You remember when you were younger and it was such a treat to sleep on it. Back then you’d beg your father to let you put it up for you and Dean even if there were two perfectly good beds and Dean was all long legs and knocked knees. You’d curl up there together with blankets and a flashlight and stay up ‘late’ talking and reading magazines.

The next morning, Dean shakes you and your father awake at eight with a cup of takeaway coffee for your father and a doughnut for you. It’s a stupid sugary breakfast and you frown at him but you put the slightly greasy bag in your backpack for later.

“Well, we’re all up now,” Dean says. “Might as well go get Sam registered for school and then we can do research, Dad.” 

Your brother is so not subtle. 

“I asked around when I went out for the coffee, the school is at the top of the hill. Apparently you can’t miss it. It’s a white building. You know, like all of the other ones here.” 

“You okay to go to school today, Sam?” 

Your father is asking because normally, when you arrive somewhere so late the night before, you wouldn’t. You like school because it’s a good escape from your life and you’re good at it but as you’ve got older the prospect of starting a new one has become progressively less exciting and more a tedious chore that never seems to end. Having to get used to the rules and procedures and unwritten culture of a school, never knowing when you’ll be pulled out again is just exhausting and you’re tired of it all.

Still, you might as well get it over with. It beats hanging out in one room with your father doing research.

“Yeah, but I need a proper breakfast, we don’t have anything.” Even you can admit it’s a little bit of a whine.

Your father changes into a clean shirt but leaves on the trousers he had slept in. He puts his jacket on and rifles around in it. He comes up with a grubby looking fruit and nut bar and hands it to you without saying anything. 

“Doesn’t this motel come with breakfast?” you ask, a little petulantly.

“It was ten dollars extra. We’ll pick up some bread later,” your father says. 

“Bread? We don’t even have a toaster.”

“We’ll get some peanut butter and jelly, too,” Dean says.

You’re still tired, too tired to argue, so you just roll off your bed and stumble into the bathroom to shower. Your father bangs on the door after five minutes and tells you he’s leaving.

You glower and mutter to yourself what’s the point of your father leaving to take you to school if you’re not even with him but you get out and quickly dry yourself with a towel – fluffy and pristine, you notice – before pulling on a clean tee and jeans.

As he heads out the door you check your backpack – sugary doughnut that will apparently be your lunch because you bet your father will consider whatever the amount the school charges for lunch to be daylight robbery, check, the book you’re currently reading because who knows how friendly these kids will be and you need something to do at break, check. There’s also lots of your clothes still in the bag from when you haphazardly threw them in at Pastor Jim’s. You dump them onto your bed and decide you’ll have to unpack properly later.

“First day of school,” Dean grins as you head out to the car. He opens the front door for you and gets in the back. 

The millionth first day this year, and there’ll be approximately a million more, but sure, Dean.

He probably thinks he’s done you such a favour, talking your father into enrolling you in school the very morning after you get to Iowa. You know he’s doing all he can for you. 

The school is indeed at the top of a hill and it is white – like most of the buildings in the town, like Dean said. It makes you feel a little like you’re in some TV sitcom, a happy, peaceful, beautiful and ordered town where people live happy, peaceful, beautiful and ordered lives. Although not if your father is to be believed, with his suspicious cows.

The school building is elegant and tall, more like a Victorian manor than the industrial schools you’re used to. The front facing façade is painted brick with carved wood decorative edgings and an almost ornamental garden planted out front. The view you see when driving up the hill where it appears the hill sits at the top of a steep slope on all sides turns out to be misleading, because at the back of the school there are large playing fields before the land gradually slopes down toward the cornfields.

When you park Dean gets out too and says, a little anxiously, “You got money for lunch?”

“Nope,” you say, popping the p. He gives you six dollars in crumpled dollar bills. 

“Thanks.”

“Have a good day.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Your father is already striding to the building, halfway to the entrance. You hurry to catch him up.

He’s surly and uncommunicative in the principal’s office, handing over your folder of immunisation and academic records silently. You’ve been sending a second copy of all school records to Pastor Jim for five years now after the disaster in Nebraska. The school official is polite and professional as she asks why you left Michigan. 

Your father doesn’t seem compelled to answer so you jump in and do the whole travelling salesman routine. She’s clearly unconvinced and inclined to believe your father is an unemployed vagrant. Thank god she has the manners not to mention your address is a motel. 

It’s all vaguely embarrassing but you can’t really mind too much because you won’t be here in a month, and also, even if your father was actually an unemployed drunk and not a man who goes around killing things trying to harm unsuspecting people like in this small sleepy town, it’s not like that would be your fault or something you should be embarrassed about at all. It shouldn’t affect how they treat you. You can prove yourself here, in this school in the little white town in the fields of southern Iowa. You always do.

Still, your father could have taken the time to change his trousers, for god’s sake. 

It’s around the second time the woman darts a glance at him, frowning very slightly, that your father remembers the need to give a good impression and keep curious officials at bay. He puts on his most charming smile and even though he’s rumpled and unshaven it looks genuine. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says, letting the hint of a southern drawl enter his voice. You roll your eyes internally. Your father thinks he’s so slick. He still looks rough, and gaunt in an awful sort of way you don’t remember seeing him looking before, even though he must have, surely, but he looks kind too and earnest. 

“I’m a travelling salesman like Sammy here said, we arrived late last night. I have some business to attend to in this area for a while but I’m not too sure how long it’ll take. Sam was very keen to get his school sorted out, he’s very studious, and I woke up late. I’m awful sorry for my appearance.”

“Oh, no worry, not at all,” she says crisply, clearly mollified, hands clasped together in acceptance of this explanation and believing totally in the dedicated hardworking father.

Once the forms have been completed and your class schedule sorted the official goes to make some copies of something and asks you to wait outside the office. You walk out with your father. 

“Dad, if you’re going to go interview anybody, you realllllly should shower and shave,” you say as you heft your backpack to the other shoulder.

He’s always taken hunting far more seriously than your education so you’re pretty certain he will. He claps you on the shoulder and tells you to have a good day before striding away. 

You sign up to the drama club and join basketball because there’s no soccer. You’ve grown a lot in the past few years and the coach is happy for you to join. If you’re back to the normal life of constantly moving, you will goddamn live a normal life. 

When you get back to the motel after school, your father has spread out the research for the case all over Dean’s camp bed. You sit on your bed, covered in the clothes you threw on it that morning. You go through your mental list of hunters, sharp in your memory after an intensive week of working on it, to note who the local ones are. Your father probably won’t contact them. 

Dean came to pick you up and you stared out the window the whole way and as far as you could see there’s nothing in Iowa but rows of corn gently waving in the breeze. You’re in a little ‘city’ with less than a thousand people. In your long experience, that’s the worst kind of place to suddenly arrive in. The school is actually okay but as you expected everyone there has lived in the area their whole lives and known each other at least since kindergarten. Still, they’re friendly enough. 

“So, have you found the missing cows?” you ask, a little cheekily. Your father can’t get angry at you for taking an interest in the hunt.

But he just looks at you blankly. 

“You know... the reason we’re here?” you say slowly, wondering if he knocked his head or something.

“Oh, that’s not the hunt anymore,” Dad says. “The farmer found them, they weren’t gone, some idiot just left a gate open.”

You’re nonplussed. “Okay but... there’s another hunt here?”

“Yeah, I was about to come back and get you from school so we could head out but then I heard about it at the diner. A fire.”

Now you think about it, you had seen students huddled together with hushed voices discussing something and heard vague snippets about a fire. 

“Right. So, the fire’s suspicious?”

“Well, not exactly,” Dean says. And there it is.

Your father waves a hand. “The demon is taunting me,” he says. He’s totally serious.

“Oh my god,” you say. You can’t help it; it just slips out.

The demon will never stop haunting your family. Even, you think, if you really do manage to kill it. The damage it’s done is so irreparable.

You shuffle over and snag some of the papers off the bed to read about the two-storey house on High Street that caught on fire just three days before you arrived. You’re not surprised at all that Dad stayed to look into it when he heard about it. It’s your father’s weakness.

As you soon find out, it’s also all the small community is talking about. You go to the post office after school one day and hear two women talking about how awful it was. You listen closely, thinking there might be something local people know that wasn’t in the newspapers. 

You’ve seen the ruined house. You drive past it when picking up food from the best diner in town. It’s on one of the main arteries in and out of town so it’s kind of hard to avoid. Dean had inhaled sharply when he saw it. You don’t remember your old house in Lawrence at all, and don’t remember seeing it in the aftermath of the flames, but you also stop in your tracks when you see the house here. Half of it is the classic local white, a pretty picture-perfect house out in the heartland, square and solid and seemingly safe, but the other half is stark and hollow, burned out and sharp edged and missing, an awful gaping hole, just wrong.

All the kids at school are talking about it. A boy you’ve got friendly with points out the empty seat of the dead child’s cousin in math class. No-one apart from your father seems to think it was anything other than a tragic accident but you also know there sometimes really is more than what appears on the surface so you keep a watchful eye out.

The old woman who owned the house was looking after her two-year-old grandchild the previous Friday while his parents were at work. He was upstairs napping and the woman was frying eggs for lunch when a small grease fire started in the kitchen. She threw water on the pan and the fire exploded and before she could do anything it grew and entered the hallway, blocking the stairs. The woman managed to flee out of the side door. A neighbour called the emergency services and looked after her until they got there.

At first, all anyone could think was ‘Thank god she got out.’ The woman told the firefighters when they arrived that there was no-one else in the house, your father’s main contention for his theory that there was something more to it. The emergency services managed to contain the fire before it spread to neighbouring buildings. The woman’s house was gutted and uninhabitable but at least she got out safe. That’s what everyone said. It seemed like a reasonably happy ending.

It was only when the woman’s daughter arrived on the scene and started screaming for her son that anyone even realised he was missing. The old woman went over to her daughter and embraced her and told her not to worry; she had got Timmy out. He was safe with her. 

That started a frantic search for the boy: had he got out with her and nobody noticed? Was he safe and sound in a neighbour’s home? 

Please god let him have got out and no-one noticed.

At that point the volunteer firefighters went into the unsafe structure but were forced to turn back and they only found his body on Saturday with diggers.

You think, like everybody else, that it was just forgetfulness of an elderly woman, unimaginably tragic. Your father thinks it’s something more sinister.

You suppose you’ve never seen something inexplicable in a fire and tried in vain to convince other people that it was real like your father has. His past blinds him to the facts of the case, you think. You don’t mention that. The little boy and his family deserve for it to be looked into thoroughly, and your father will certainly do that.

The trouble is, you think, your father would never leave a burning building with a child trapped inside. He just couldn’t imagine it so it seems totally inexplicable to him. But you’re sure the woman just forgot, in the blind panic of a growing fire, that her grandson was even there. His mother sobbed to the grim-faced journalists that she left the boy with his grandmother often but not usually in the mornings. He had a cold so she thought he’d be better with his grandma that morning than at his nursery...

You think the grandmother’s baffling action of saying she had rescued him is easily explained. When the mother came screaming for her child, she couldn’t accept what she had done. It was pure survival instinct to insist she had saved him because who could survive leaving your grandchild to die alone and scared in a burning house. Our brains do incredible things to protect ourselves. 

It only takes your father a week to determine somehow that it really was just a tragic accident and nothing supernatural and nasty has reappeared. But that’s a week you’ve been in school and settling in because you never know how long it will take. You invest too much of yourself, each time, and every time you leave it’s like you’re leaving something of you behind. Partly it comforts you, that there are pieces of you in cities and towns all across the country. Partly it makes you feel like soon there’ll be nothing of you left.

Dean tells you you’ll stay in Iowa at least until the Christmas holidays and you hope so because apparently the town puts on all kinds of events and parties and decorates to the nines for the holidays, but you obviously can’t afford to stay at the fancy motel inn until then.

You worry your father will just break his promise but instead you move to a shitty apartment in a shitty part of town on the outskirts of Des Moines. The landlord lives next door and is a little temperamental but your father doesn’t seem to notice. You don’t say anything because at least it has a kitchen and a bedroom away from your father. It’s close enough to commute so Dean drives you to school every day and there are a million car dealers in the area and he gets a job at one of them once it’s clear there’s no hunt. Just a burnt out house you have to drive past and look at every day. You hope like hell that family recovers better than yours did. Would be hard to do worse, anyway.

Iowa, Michigan – whatever, it doesn’t matter, whatever small boring state you’re in. Maybe next you’ll go to Kansas and finish this forever.

At least your school isn’t doing the Great Depression in history. You settle into the routine you’ve known your whole life. Your father disappears in the evening to god knows where because you know he doesn’t have a hunt. You sit at the rickety kitchen table you’ve bought, with stains that you think are at least a hundred years old, and do your homework after school. You make good friends with the boy in math class but you don’t want to invite him to Des Moines, although he thinks it’s cool you live in the big city. Sometimes on Saturdays Dean drives you back to the small town so you can sit in the milkshake bar with your friend while Dean spends his time oiling the Impala and flirting with any women who walks past and looks vaguely interested.

Your father goes out every morning and buys all the newspapers he can find, then spends the day going through them looking for anything out of the ordinary. Of course, something wouldn’t be news if it wasn’t extraordinary which is how you ended up in Iowa in the first place chasing after missing cows. You read about a terror attack in Egypt where sixty tourists were killed. It seems clear terrorists were responsible, like the ones that bombed the World Trade Center, but your father will probably want to look into it for demonic influence. 

“Dude, people are crazy,” Dean says, mouth full of the sandwich he’s eating, after your father confirms it really was just people responsible.

You agree.

Dean says your father doesn’t know yet where you’re going after Iowa. There’s nowhere to go. That’s the problem. You’re always moving forward, chasing after the next hunt, but this time there isn’t one. You can’t go to Bobby’s where half of the hunters in South Dakota are holed up and your father hates all of them and most of them hate him in return. 

You can’t go to Pastor Jim’s because they had some argument over the phone that has your father still trembling in fury days later and he’s told you he’s never setting foot there again. That’s probably a lie but your father is stubborn, so who really knows. So despite what Pastor Jim had said, you won’t be spending Christmas in Minnesota. In a deeply hypocritical but typical move your father has forbidden you from using the phone for longer than a few minutes because it costs too much so you can’t even call Jim to commiserate. You hope he regrets telling you to be understanding of your father.

And you can’t go home. You can’t go back to Kansas. When you were five you and Dean watched The Wizard of Oz on TV and the monkeys scared you but you wanted to be a big boy like Dean so you didn’t say anything, but then at the end Dorothy tapped her heels together and said “There’s no place like home,” and was about to go back to Kansas - old country Kansas, black and white and boring Kansas, Kansas where her family was, where her home was – and Dean turned it off before it was over and declared it was a stupid film. But you always liked that in the end, she got her happy ending. She got to go home. When you were five, you still thought that was possible for you.

And that meagre list is it for places that are at all meaningful to you. You learned real early not to get attached to places you lived in. 

“You’re so lucky, Sam,” your friend says to you one day. It’s after school and you’re at his house, playing on his PlayStation. He got it for his last birthday. 

“What do you mean?” you say, eyes glued to the screen.

“Getting to move around, seeing the whole country. I was born in this town and I’m going to die in it. My whole family’s been here for centuries.”

Such permanent roots. You can’t even imagine it.

“What,” you say, so surprised you lift your head and on the screen you skid off the road. “You can go anywhere you want for college, man. I told you my dad won’t let me.”

“Yeah but – I wouldn’t want to, I guess. My family just don’t move around. We’re just not that kind of people. And I wouldn’t want to leave my whole family. It’s scary, you know? My grandad and my dad knew they were going to go down the mines at eighteen. But now they’re gone. And I don’t know what I’ll be.”

“Yeah, but. Isn’t the possibility exciting?”

“The possibility is scary,” he says.

He never had a choice either.

~

You remember being six years old and being the only one in your class to know that Topeka was the capital of Kansas and how proud you felt when the teacher said “Good job, Sam.” At every school you’ve ever been to you’ve introduced yourself as Sam Winchester, from Lawrence, Kansas even though you left Lawrence when you were six months old and never returned. 

When you were six you had Dean and your Dad and the Impala and that was it but it was enough, it really was. Walking down cracked city streets or on a forest path or driving in the suburban sprawl that existed on the outskirts of a major city, on your way home from school or the playground to a motel room or a run-down basement apartment or that foreclosed house in Detroit where the owners had even stripped the pipes out, your hand in Dean’s, silently skipping the cracks because you could never be too careful and maybe the monster that got mothers would come back and take Dean too, talking non-stop about anything you wanted and Dean always listening. Your father striding ahead and hurrying to keep up with him, wanting to walk in his footsteps always.

Your father coming home after a day at ‘work’ or after a weekend trip or even after two weeks where you never noticed anything wrong because what child really truly questions their life and how normal it is; they just accept it and rationalise anything and everything. Running up to him when he returned from wherever he had been and him catching you in his arms and swinging you up high and feeling the rush of air on your hair before he put you back down on the ground.

All those nights curled up in the backseat of the Impala, feeling the miles pound away beneath you as the lights flickered across your face. Staring out the window, its comforting litany lulling you to sleep, warm and safe and everything you knew in the car with you. Pretending to be asleep when you parked and your father heaving you into his arms and carrying you into wherever you had arrived and wherever it was, be it Missouri or Rhode Island, you were with your family and so you were home. 

Such happy memories, now tainted for you because it was all a lie. Your father put you down onto the bed and took out a beer and Dean led you into the bedroom to get ready for bed and then distracted you with a book so you didn’t have to see your father drunk. Your father and Dean always laugh about tiny Dean desperately shushing you when you were a crying baby so you didn’t wake up your father, and how developmentally inappropriate was that for you both?

You were a victim of your childhood. Your brother was an even bigger victim of your childhood. From the little he says about it you guess your father was a victim of his, too, but god help you, you don’t really care. 

He could stop this whenever he wanted. If he told Dean to stop hunting and to settle down and to get a steady job and a girl, Dean would. Dean loves hunting but he loves your father more. Your father is the only person in the world who could make Dean stop hunting, and he won’t.

You hate him for that.

Dean never got to pretend to be asleep in the backseat of the car because there was nobody to carry him out. He never got to dream and play make-believe because he was always rooted to the cold hard reality of being responsible for himself and his brother. Dean won’t tell you when he first shot a gun, and you don’t remember, but that alone tells you enough.

When you were young, you didn’t care that you were different, that your father was different. That you didn’t have a mother – you’d never known any different, after all. You didn’t care that more often than not, when your father would stumble into whatever shack you were living in at the moment it was the middle of the night or he was drunk or covered in blood. You were a child. You just didn’t notice.

You care now.

You’re starting to realise your family, although you love them, and your life, although it’s all you’ve ever known, won’t always be enough. That you want more and deserve more.

Your mother wouldn’t want this. You’re as sure of this as you are that your name is Sam Winchester and the capital of Kansas is Topeka. You’ve never said that to either Dad or Dean. Your father would never hit you but your brother might give you a slug across the face for saying that. He loved her so much. 

And you get it, really. You remember being four. You remember the fuzzy memories of your toy bear and your first teacher and the clear, sharp ever-present love for Dean and implicitly trusting his comforting presence was there always. You don’t know what you’d do if it had been ripped away from you, the way your mother was taken away from Dean. You’d probably end up just like him.

~

The longer you stay in Iowa, restless and useless, the worst things get. As usual. Your father makes Dean quit his job to help him because maybe local newspapers were dying but there were still far too many for one person to go through alone in a day. Dean didn’t complain even though he had always been active and energetic, unlike your comparative lethargy. He was always happy to go outside at six in the morning to run laps or practice archery while you were bleary eyed and moaning.

But he sat there uncomplaining for hours at a time in the living room at the table with your father, reading through newspapers. Half the time when Dean said he had come up with something, your father shot it down, and half the time he called the nearest hunter, abrupt and no nonsense, and it never ended up being anything worth checking out. 

Dean suggested again that he should go to LA, or maybe all of you. You wouldn’t mind too much because at least it would get you moving and you think it’s worth a try Dean asking, but of course your father shoots it down.

“Hunters are dangerous,” Dad grunted, like he always did.

Your general response to this was always grim amusement, sometimes internal and sometimes, when you were particularly pissed, scoffed out loud even though you knew it’d bring a fight. Was your father kidding? 

Hunters were dangerous, sure – but monsters weren’t? Shapeshifters weren’t? Wraiths that lived in deepest darkest swamps and tried to drown you if you got close weren’t? A lot of Dean’s most visible scars on his arms, to be fair to your father, weren’t actually from monsters but were a long accumulation of burns from cooking, but still. The scars of a forty-year-old housewife. Not a child who shouldn’t have been using the oven unsupervised at the age he did.

You imagine your father just doesn’t want you comparing notes on him with another hunter, doesn’t want Dean to hear what other hunters have to say about him – presumably nothing complimentary. There’s some sort of truce, or at least ceasefire, so the hunters can come together and pool their respective knowledge and experience to try and figure out what had happened and why, but if anyone’s going to break the uneasy peace it would be your father.

You do your share of research in the evening without complaining too, because reading local newspapers is kind of boring but also kind of hilarious. They have the craziest stories, as well as articles so mundane they looped back around to being interesting. It certainly wasn’t dangerous which was your favourite type of hunting work. You and Dean have fun pointing out the stupidest stories until your asshole of a father asked sardonically if you were having enough fun. You resisted the urge to point out you were willingly doing research for him on a Friday night and Dean had been sitting at that table all day.

You catch Dean checking the cabinets and realised it was for alcohol. Things got bad in your house sometimes. You figured it did for everyone. It was always Dean’s job to make it better. Had been ever since he was 4 years old. You were fourteen now, and thought you should probably share the burden, help Dean to help your father.

Instead, you stood there for a minute in silence before walking away. Your father disgusted you. What else was new?

You stood there, feeling a dull burn, surprised to find you didn’t feel anything. You had felt a sick feeling of shame burn low in your stomach the first time you had realised what he did to cope. Now, you just felt sad for Dean. Dean cared so much about your father. You’d have let him drink himself to death if you were the older sibling so you supposed it was good you weren’t.

The next day you come downstairs to see Dean chugging milk at the sink, staring out of the window into the weak sun, and when you asked where your father was Dean just said he was gone. Normally you’d ask where, but right at that moment, you couldn’t bring yourself to care. You have a fun weekend with Dean. Your father had taken the Impala so Dean went to the garage to do a few oil changes and then borrowed one of the cars. You raced through rural Iowa, breathless and laughing, until the headlights came on. Dean dropped you off at the apartment before returning the car and you climbed the stairs, still smiling. When he got back a little later, his friend driving, he was smiling too, whistling jovially and care free. You felt calm and happy and – yes, okay. Safe. 

Your father was the best father when he was gone. Wasn’t that sad.

The weeks go by, rainy November turning into a cold December in Iowa, snow blowing in, and things settle down a little. The worried conversations late at night with Bobby or other hunters your father doesn’t tell you the names of fade away. John has a brief call, wincing at the international phone charges, with a hunter in Scotland who said his sonar showed ol Nessie was gone and he knew the Americans were having trouble with disappearing mythical creatures too. You were interested in that one actually, leaning over your father’s shoulder until he shooed you away and it was just like him to keep anything interesting from you. He still looks grim a lot of the time but even he laughed about ‘ol Nellie’ and he’s drinking less.

Because you can basically read newspapers anywhere and look normal you and Dean go out to diners a lot in the evening. You’re trying to find the best pie in the county. School is fine too, especially as the holidays approach and your classes become more about watching films than book reports and math problems.

Winter break comes and you let yourself be interested in the mystery of the disappearing demons. It’s always easier when you and Dad get along, and it’s cold outside and you’d be bored otherwise because your latest school didn’t give much work for the holidays and you knew you probably wouldn’t be back there after the vacation anyway. 

You come downstairs the first day, already showered and dressed, and sit down, asking your dad whether he wanted help with the research. He looked vaguely nonplussed and surprised, as if he couldn’t believe you wanted to help without being asked and cajoled into it, and that was so unfair, you did care, you were happy to spend your free time helping others and saving people, just not all your time. But you stayed quiet because you were trying to be helpful, not start an argument.

Your father solves two murder cases and helps catch a serial killer in Nevada from your apartment in Des Moines. Soon it’s almost two months since the last confirmed kill of a supernatural creature. You let yourself believe you can have an actual Christmas this year, not one where your father announces there is a hunt two days before Christmas and ‘don’t give me that look Samuel, demons don’t have holidays or celebrate Christmas.’ 

Real Christmas! Iowa will supply the snow. You and Dean could cook a feast. Turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce. Pie for dessert, home-made and that’s the best of all. Your father would have no reason to get drunk at Christmas, you tell yourself. You’ll bake gingerbread and decorate them. You ask Dean about Christmas, knowing you’ll need to plan, and he just mm’s. You know he doesn’t want you to get your hopes up. 

You pray fervently that the demons won’t decide to come back on Christmas day and you spend another Christmas in the back seat of the Impala eating gas station pizza and looking into the brightly lit houses you pass, Christmas trees in most of them, wishing you were part of their family, or just anyone else at all, really.

Then you worry that your prayer is selfish and you call Pastor Jim despite your father’s explicit orders not to and ask him. 

“Samuel,” he says, sounding a little amused. “You want a Christmas where you and your family are safe and together and happy. That’s not selfish.”

Your father, reading the phone bill later and scowling already because he had spent so much and at least he couldn’t blame that on you, apparently recognises Pastor Jim’s number and asks out loud who had rung that son of a bitch motherfucker traitor.

Dean jumps in and lies, telling your father he had rung him because he wanted his advice on whether animal mutilations in some farm in Carolina was suspicious or not. Your brother, your hero.

You resolve to thank him later in private and say “Language, Dad,” obnoxiously from where you’re sitting on the sofa reading. 

You don’t end up spending Christmas in Des Moines, Iowa.

The night before Christmas Eve, while the snow falls silently and gently around you, you’re throwing your meagre belongings into the trunk in the middle of the night, resisting the urge to spit ‘I told you so’. The landlord sits shaking up in your apartment, Dean’s gun held to his head, and if you see your brother kill his first human over fucking rent of all things you’re going to throw up and then kill your father with your bare hands. 

You’re so tired. You bite your tongue only because who the fuck knows what would happen if the situation escalated. 

As you’re safe in the car speeding away, Dean safe and unbloodied in the passenger seat, the apartment growing smaller and faint in the rear view mirror, you let yourself relax and shake your head, scoffing softly. 

Because who could have known how it was going to end - without Dean’s salary, you in school and your father spending all day reading newspapers! Oh, only every single person who knew your father. But not the man himself, apparently.

You hadn’t even known you were behind on rent. Neither had Dean, apparently, because you don’t know how else to account for his totally blank look when the door came down at two in the morning and the landlord came in screaming and swearing blind about a missing rent payment. 

Dean was already sitting straight up in bed, scanning the situation like he had been trained to do while you were still blinking awake, the knife he always kept under his pillow clenched in his hand. 

But the guns were unloaded and locked in the trunk of the Impala. The only thing by your bedside was To Kill a Mockingbird. Not even a heavy book; it wouldn’t make a dent in the man’s forehead. Your father was somehow still fast asleep on the sofa outside – must be drunk, you realised - and you had an uncharitable thought of, ‘he’s going to sleep through our murders’. 

There was just a brief moment before the landlord strode over to your beds and during it Dean told you to stay low. He pounced as soon as the man got close, wrestled with him for a few seconds and with a sickening lurch in your stomach you realised the man had a gun. You barely had time to get scared before the gun glinted solidly in Dean’s steady hand. 

His chest heaved as he pointed it at the landlord and told him to keep his hands in the air or he’d blast his fucking face off. You started when a hand clamped onto your shoulder but when you looked up you saw it was just your father. In all the furore you had forgotten about him. He had obviously woken up during the brief fight and was now conscious and awake just when he was totally fucking useless. He told you to get everything you needed and pack up, hurry, Sam. 

He told Dean to keep the gun levelled at the man’s head. Point blank range.

“Christo,” Dean said, and when the man didn’t even blink, Dean looked confused.

You stood up and almost stumbled out of the room. Dad turned all of the lights on, and you felt heady and confused in the sudden brightness. You grabbed whatever you could see and stuffed it into a bag. You were probably missing things, but that didn’t seem to matter. You forced yourself to take a breath and think about what you needed: papers, money... A lot of the important stuff lived in the car anyway.

When you got back to your bedroom, Dean’s standing in the same position with the landlord, his hands held loosely up. He’s sweaty and dishevelled, like he doesn’t understand what is happening. Your father is finishing packing up yours and Dean’s stuff.

“Please,” the man says. “Don’t kill me. I have a daughter.”

“I have two sons,” your father snaps. “You came here into their bedroom with a loaded gun. Shut the fuck up.”

“Please,” the man moans.

You can’t listen to this. 

“Nobody’s dying, okay?” Dean says, low. “Just keep your hands up and don’t try anything.”

“Check you’ve got everything, Sam, and check your brother’s stuff too.”

You do as told. You check under the beds and in the cupboards. You find a pair of socks and one of Dean’s cassette and stuff them into one of the overflowing bags. You zip them up and prepare to take them outside but suddenly your dad is there and taking them off you.

“I’ve got them, we don’t know what’s out there. Tie him up. Use this tape. Make it tight.”

“Dad...” Dean says, hesitant and unsure. But he can’t save you from this. You take the tape and pull one of the rickety chairs into the bedroom. Make the man sit down, under Dean’s watchful gaze, and truss him up.

“Tighter, Sam.” 

You pull a little.

“This man was going to kill you in your bed as you slept.”

Maybe. You think maybe he just wanted to scare your dad. God knows what he wanted.

“What if, what if nobody comes looking here?” He looks terrified and wild eyed. Your father grabs the tape and puts it over his mouth, wrapping it round and round his head so he won’t be able to get it off.

“That ain’t my problem, sir,” your father says coldly. “Me and my boys will be long gone. You should understand I don’t generally leave threats to them alive. If you come after us I will tell my son to empty the trigger into your worthless mouth. If I hear anything about this, I’ll come back.”

Your father checks the binding is tight and puts two bags into your hands. He takes the rest of them. 

You’ll never be coming back here. In the panic and terror, you don’t look around and say goodbye.

“Go first, Dean.”

He doesn’t have to tell Dean to keep the gun up and finger on the trigger, gaze trained into the looming darkness, as you all descend down the stairs to the safety of the Impala and the open road. You’re in the middle, the heavy bags straining over your shoulder, and your father brings up the rear, walking backwards without stumbling, watching the man carefully, covering your back and your retreat.

After you’ve driven for an hour and crossed state lines, you abruptly pull over and your father disposes of the man’s gun.

Then you drive for ten hours non-stop and screech into Denver. None of you have slept.

Dean’s still silent and grim-faced in the passenger seat. 

“I got that money from the old man, Dad,” you say, still almost breathless from what had happened the night before, and nobody argues with you and tells you to keep your hard earned money. “Let’s go find a phone and I’ll call Pastor Jim.”

“God damn it,” your father says. “I paid that fucking rent money.” 

He’s been saying that or a variant on it for the past ten hours and frankly you’re sick of it.

“Sure, Dad,” you say but you don’t believe him. God – fucking – damn it.

You’re hungry but you don’t ask to stop for lunch. You always know this would happen with the money. You’re grimly resigned to it. Forget college. You can’t even keep a few thousand for six months.

“Let’s stay in a motel this time,” Dean says and it’s the first thing he’s said in six hundred miles so your father doesn’t argue. You don’t either, even though in all likelihood that means no Christmas dinner tomorrow and maybe all sharing one room again for god knows how long. Until you get chased out by the owner with an old rifle or the police with questions you just can’t answer truthfully or nosy teachers. Or an acquaintance of your father that he can never let become a friend so instead you just leave. Every time. Every single goddamn time.

~ 

When you think of home you don’t think of Kansas. You don’t think of the Impala, even. You don’t think of a motel room or an apartment. You think of the little house you lived in for six months when you were eight. It was just before you found out the truth, the last long stay before your life cracked open. You moved more then, when you were younger, back when you didn’t complain about the importance of school. So you weren’t used to staying somewhere for so long. 

The leaves of the maple tree outside fell slowly onto the house, covering it with a soft down. You were there to watch the seasons change out of your window from your little room at the top of the house. You’d sit there for hours and read or just watch people outside the dorm windows. You came to recognise them and their routines, the post man, the friendly little girl next door, the man across the street who washed his Volvo every Sunday morning. It was just what you had always imagined from a home.

You cried, and cried, and cried when you had to leave. You just couldn’t understand it. Wasn’t this your home? Back then, when you didn’t know the truth of why you were always moving, you always vaguely hoped every time that this time would be the time you finally stayed somewhere forever. You don’t even remember the excuse your father gave. Maybe he didn’t give you one at all. 

You were inconsolable. Dean was a big boy by then. Your father was impatient and unplacating. As you sobbed your father whined about your crying in the driver’s seat and poor Dean who was nowhere near as old as you remember him being had to be the adult, firm and gentle by turns. 

After six hours of that your father crossly pulled into a roadside diner, swinging the steering wheel wildly. At four hours in, he had told you the reason you were leaving was because you were such a bad boy which contrary to his desired outcome only made the waterworks intensify.

“You’re not having dessert tonight, Sam.”

You didn’t care. You didn’t care about anything. You didn’t care about anything but the hundreds of miles you had just driven between where you were now and where you thought of as home and couldn’t ever imagine not returning to.

Dean waited until your father had left the car before turning to you and saying he wasn’t hungry for dessert, even if they had pie. The biggest sacrifice 12-year-old Dean could make. He smiled at you, a little tentative, and got out to join your father. After a moment you did too. You were drained and exhausted from the crying, and felt terrible, but you were hungry and thirsty too. And you knew your dad wouldn’t be stopping again tonight, even if you were starving.

You wondered whether he’d punish you by making you order something you hated, or just give you bread and water or something, but he let you order pasta, even though it was two dollars more expensive than his and Dean’s burgers. You always noticed things like that.

Dean gave you some of his fries and you made him eat a few bits of spinach from your salad because he needed more green in his diet. Nobody really talked.

Your father made Dean get a slice of blueberry pie afterwards. Your favourite, not his. Dean preferred apple.

“A big slice, please,” your father said, smiling at the waitress.

Dean couldn’t finish it. Your father normally abhorred waste, but he didn’t say anything, just let the glistening pie sit on the table and congeal as you sat in silence, like a declaration. 

Your father grabbed your arm across the table when Dean was in the bathroom.

“This sulking stops now, Samuel.”

You wanted to wrench away but his grip was too tight.

“Ow, dad!” you screamed loudly. Heads turned. Good. You wanted to make a scene.

His eyes flashed but he loosened his grip slightly.

“This sulking is only upsetting your brother. There’s no use in it whatsoever. I’m not turning back. Now if you don’t stop it I’ll leave you here because I won’t have a brat in my car, do you understand me?”

“I’m upset, dad,” you whined.

“I know you are. But I want you to stop sulking. It’s not going to get you anything. I’m tired and I’ve been driving for six hours, I’m not in the mood to indulge this temper tantrum.”

Not going to get you an apology or an explanation. Not going to get you your father’s love or understanding. Not going to get you a home.

“Now, can we both forget about it and have a quieter trip from now on?”

His anger faded, as suddenly as it always did, but you remained silent. Every time you thought about your maple tree outside your window sill, where you had sat on and read for many long happy hours, you wanted to cry again and never stop. You couldn’t believe you’d never see it again, never go back.

He sighed and slid the plate of crumbling left over pie towards you.

“Eat the damn pie.”

At that point you didn’t even really want to. You ate it mechanically, too fast, but it was too sweet and all it did was settle in your stomach and add to the funny, sick, sad feeling you had there all day.

“Is this what it was like leaving Kansas?” you asked Dean as you sat with him in the car as your father filled the gas tank.

Dean didn’t look at you.

“I don’t really remember.”

“But -”

“Sam – stop. Just stop.”

So you stopped.


End file.
